July 22, 2005
Canadian Summertime
We’ve had a busy week, which required us to swim in lakes daily. Our two day break at the Delawana was amazing. Our room was beautiful with a screened in porch and a jacuzzi. We canoed and kayaked, and it was very upscale Butlins, with a Rock and Roll Tribute show. Alan Thicke was a guest a few weeks ago, so you know it’s a good place. It is and we had a wonderful time. I am enjoying showing Stuart Canadian summertime. He was on corn-watch all the way home, but alas it is early in the season so there was none yet available at the roadside. We’ll keep an eye out. In other news, I was kidnapped on Thursday and taken to another bridal shower! This was thrown by Britt’s mom and our neighbour, and there were so many people there. It was lovely to have all these women come together to celebrate a new marriage, and I think such traditions are an excellent feature of our society. Anyway, I have been terribly out of the loop and mad novel reading as the summer is passing me by and my stack of novels to be read remains a large stack.
Here, on how porn has infiltrated everyday life, magazines Zoo and Nuts as evidence. I find embarrassing what those magazines say about the society I live in, and agree that young boys (and girls) are going to have increasing warped ideas about sexuality. Here, on looking for ladies in the Vatican- in the archives for records of those who wrote in Latin. Here, Ivor Tossell keeps us abreast of what’s sweeping the nation this week (and it ain’t happy slapping). Very funny, via Bookninja, a critique of authors’ acknowledgement pages. Russell Smith asks if Harry Potta and his friends are indicative the loss of distinction between culture and youth culture? He also doesn’t appear to like books with more than one woman. Cool! Top 10 “On the move” books, including “The Summer Book” by Tove Janssen.
We took a boat ride with some Americans this morning. They were really lovely, but I really noticed such a difference between their response to the London terror attacks and other Canadians and Britons I’ve spoken to. It’s really so much more of a personal issue for them. We distance ourselves from it, perhaps because we can and from the few words we exchanged about it, they definitely can’t.
July 22, 2005
Guide to Identifying Shitty Highway Houses
In our drive up to Muskoka this week, we named the roadside phenomenon that is the “Shitty Highway House”. These are houses with skyhigh levels of shittiness, and can identified by having two or more of the following characteristics:
1) A door hovering in midair, with no means to exit to the ground. Somehow stairs seem to be optional in shitty highway houses.
2) A former school bus parked in the drive way
3) A pick-up truck on blocks
4) Four vehicles or more
5) More than two extensions, especially if they are constructed from completely different materials and don’t match
6) A door or window that has been bricked or boarded up, or a door or window that has been replaced and doesn’t quite fit in the alloted space
7) No visible door and no window larger 8 by 7 inches
8) An elaborately-planned new home, abandoned midjob and thus lacking bricks, a front porch, garage doors, a lawn etc but still happily lived-in
9) No landscaping
10) Raised bungalow
July 18, 2005
Konstantin
I love Margaret Drabble. I am reading the afore mentioned “Gates of Ivory” and absolutely loving it. It’s the final book in “The Radiant Way” trilogy, which got me on my Drabble kick in the first place, though it concerns less the three women of the first two books than one of their friends, Stephen Cox, who is missing somewhere in Asia. In Thailand, he has met up with a young photographer called Konstantin Vassiliou who I realised was a character in “The Needle’s Eye”, which was published in 1972. “Gates of Ivory” was published two decades later. In the former, Konstantin was the son of the main character, maybe ten years old? And now he turns up again, grown up in the mid-eighties. There is no reason that had to have happened. Konstantin in “The Needle’s Eye” could have been a forgettable character, and that Margaret Drabble would choose to resurrect him is just fascinating. I look forward to finding out why she did as the story develops. Her characters frequently recur, but just in passing. I absolutely love that world.
July 18, 2005
And you know it
Lately, the world has been presenting itself to me on a silver platter. Not the whole world mind you, but just the parts I am interested in. We had another weekend in Toronto, and were shown hospitality beyond our wildest dreams. On Saturday, my friends threw the world’s most pleasant wedding shower in my honour, at Burwash Hall at Vic. We had an enormous amount of fun and I saw people I haven’t seen in ages. Everyone had a really good time, and it was quite a surprise. Was rendered dumbfounded and we all know how often that occurs. Afterwards it was dinner in Chinatown, and then karaoke at the Gladstone which was interesting to say the least, and quite enjoyable. I was surrounded by all the beautiful people and had a lot of fun. The rest of the weekend was less organised, and mostly involved me reclining in various places. We had a brilliant dinner at Kate’s and today I got the world’s cutest bathing suit, which is a good replacement for my current “the world’s biggest bathing suit”. I deal in superlatives. The fun just continues then, as we are going out for dinner tomorrow night on a gift certificate thanks to my dad, and then to the Delawana Inn on Thursday for two days of Canadian Summertime fun (with canoes!) thanks to my sister’s wedding gift. If you’re lucky and you know it, stomp your feet.
July 16, 2005
The future's in the air
I flipped through “The Believer” today, and though I am way too poor to buy it managed to read the excellent Three Songs from the End of History: Billy Joel, The Scorpions and Jesus Jones, about pop at the end of the Cold War, which is definitely a subject subject dear to my heart. It also concurs with my theory that the nineties were heaven on earth, and we were spoiled for it. An article on lost photos of Hiroshima, which made me think for the first time about why our enduring image of the attack there is of the mushroom cloud, whereas pictures of London or Dresden burning are almost gratuituous. We saw Ann Marie MacDonald read tonight at the Lakefield Literary Festival tonight, and she was brilliant. She read from “The Way The Crow Flies” and it was so gripping. I was gutted that it ended when it did, and it turned out they’d gone over time. I’ve really missed being engaged with culture the last year or so, and even when I lived in England, where I was still an outsider. Canadians are obsessed with themselves and with spend hours defining Canadianness and Can Lit etc. and I’ve really missed those conversations, that exchange of ideas. It’s really good to be back.
July 15, 2005
You can get used to this
Tonight we went out in the boat. There had been a pretty anti-climactic storm this afternoon that did kill the heat a bit, and the air was just fresh. We went swimming off the boat and the water was perfectly warm, we just slipped in with pleasure rather than icy torture. My mom had packed a picnic dinner- chicken and watermelon. There were loons in the water and the sky was blue, the sun reflected broken in the waves. Stuart asked, “Is this Canada?”. My dad laughed and told him it was. Stu said, “I’ll adapt.”
July 14, 2005
It's not easy
Lionel Shriver’s strange column, volume two. She doubts Tony Blair’s ability to stand up to terrorists, in light of concessions made toward terrorists in Northern Ireland. It’s a complicated issue, and perhaps she draws parallels too quickly. I think when you have to live with people who harbour some legitimate grievences against you, compromise is necessary if you want to move out of the Dark Ages. In Italy, ignorant people engage in print warfare. It’s drawn parallels to this story, as Theo Van Gogh’s murderer goes on trial in Holland. There is no black and white anymore, no room for sweeping statements. Living together has become unbelievably complicated and requires an open mind.
I enjoyed “The Dialectic of Fat” from Ms. The article talks about the centrality of women’s weight to her identity, double standards, fat as a feminist issue and the new globalisation of eating disorders. I find it so interesting to look at the way Western media has affected women’s body images internationally. It’s sometimes difficult to strike a balance between these feminist fat acceptance ideas, and the fact they could be seen as excuses to be unhealthy. I think the former is more important. The article mentions the amount of time women spend at the gym these days, and how many of these women really are seeking health over thinness. It’s an absolute fixation for most women I know, regardless of what they actually weigh, and really there are so many more important things to worry about.
Found The Gates of Ivory by Margaret Drabble today in a used bookshop. It’s the final book of the Radiant Way trilogy, the first of which was absolutely brilliant and the second (A Natural Curiousity) which I enjoyed. I’ve never seen it used (or new- it’s out of print now) and the spine wasn’t even cracked. So now I have all the Drabbles except “The Red Queen” which isn’t in paperback yet anyway. And we saw Dr Barnardo’s Children tonight. It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, so moving and entertaining. It’s such an important story and was told in such an honest way. We also went to our wedding reception venue to check it out and it was lovely. Tomorrow we’re renting a sander to get ready to repaint some furniture for our new apartment and selecting flowers for the wedding, and perhaps going for a ride on our boat on Clear Lake.
July 11, 2005
Cancon on
Now reading Geist, which is odd and not entirely satisfying, Northrop Frye’s “The Educated Imagination” and the play Alice’s Affair by Susan Coyne. We are going to see “Doctor Barnardo’s Children” at the 4th Line Theatre this week and to see Ann-Marie McDonald read at The Lakefield Literary Festival on Friday. Apparently we are also going canoeing tomorrow. I think we can determine that I am getting my Cancon on, even though I missed seeing Lighthouse at the Festival of Lights last week.
